In general, in an apparatus for processing characters, it is technically important to carry out segmentation of written characters and to detect their locations (lines and character locations) on a document. Moreover, when a correction character was written with a black pencil or the like on a document text with typed or printed characters, it was necessary to carry out segmentation of the written character or the like from the document.
Thus, the document was conventionally printed out by using colored ink to which an image leader is insensitive to thereby separate the typed characters and the written correction character.
FIG. 13 shows a configuration diagram of a conventional document processing apparatus. The document processing apparatus is provided with a document file 101, a printing out unit 102, a photoelectric converting unit 105, an electronic data storing unit 106, a typed or printed character location detection unit 107, a character segmentation unit 108, a recognition unit 109, a correspondence making unit 110, and a document processing unit 111.
FIG. 14 is an explanatory diagram about conventional document processing.
Contents of the document file 101 are outputted by the printing out unit 102 with colored ink being used for obtaining a printout 103. For example, in an input of correction 114, a recognized document 114a is printed by colored ink with marks 114b indicating character locations and a mark 114c indicating a line location being printed together in black. On the input of correction 114, there are written a correction sign and a correction character 114d. The document of correction 114, for which the correction sign is written on the printout 103, is obtained as a result of photoelectric conversion 115 by the photoelectric converting unit 105 insensitive to the colored ink, and stored in the electronic data storing unit 106. Then, in the typed character location detection unit 107, on the basis of the result of photoelectric conversion 115, locations on the electronic data at which typed characters are written are detected by marks 115b indicating character locations and a mark 115c indicating a line location. Meanwhile, in the character segmentation unit 108, on the basis of the same result of photoelectric conversion 115, the written correction sign and correction character 115d are detected for obtaining locations thereof on the electronic data, and along with this, are recognized by the recognition unit 109.
In the correspondence making unit 110, on the basis of a result obtained in the typed character location detection unit 107 and a result obtained in the character segmentation unit 108, the written character is made to correspond to a character to be corrected as to in which line and where in the line the character to be corrected is. Then, the document correction unit 111 corrects the document file 101.